R.D. Armstrong's poems "Old Paint" and "The Road (More or Less Traveled)

Bio: (RD Armstrong) Raindog has retired. He spends his days trying to remember how he got here; floating down a lazy river that lives in his mind. He continues to help out wherever he can, but he's no longer running the Lummox Press. Ah, what a relief!

Old Paint

 

Spanish Mike

sat on the tailgate

of his pickup and

waited for

the dust cloud to

reach him.

 

The pickup, an

ancient, rusting

thing, had finally

lurched to a halt,

a death rattle shaking

the frame as the last

drops of oil

sizzled on the hot

roadway. The pickup,

which Mike had nursed

through ten years of

hard, lonely roads,

finally threw a rod

outside Mexican Hat

and it was through

some fluke that he’d

been able to get as far as

the southern edge of

Monument Valley,

almost to the Grand

Canyon exit.

 

Mike waited for the

USPS Ranger to get

close enough to see him

before he pumped a

couple of rounds of

deer shot into the

radiator, a symbolic

coup-de-gras and flipped

the sawed-off up to

his chin like Lucas

McCain might

have done.

 

© 2022 RD Armstrong

 

 

The Road (More or Less Traveled)

 

Day’s end and I’m

picking up pieces

of past lives

scattered across this plane

of memory.

It is an incomplete geometry

with angles so obtuse

they will not intersect,

the whys outnumber the ex’s

and yet, they still add up to zero.

Day’s end and I’m

unsure what the product is.

These calculations

should add up to sum-thing

but I’m not sure what its value is.

The road winds on ahead

of me, and even though I left

the station at four thirty and

have been travelling at sixty

miles per hour, and I still don’t

know when I will arrive

 

or, worse yet, where.

 

© 2022 RD Armstrong